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14th Amendment (1868) • Section 1. • All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
15th Amendment (1870) • Section 1. • The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Jim Crow Laws • State laws enacted to keep blacks below whites / segregated • Segregated railcars / busses • Poll Tax / Literacy tests for voting • Grandfather clause • Louisiana law – could only vote if voted in 1868, or descended from someone who did • Blacks did not have the right to vote in 1868 • KKK forms
1895 – “Atlanta Compromise” • Booker T. Washington – influential black leader • Gave a speech to a largely white audience • Was seeking economic opportunity, not equality • Well received by whites because of his willingness to forgo social equality • “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
1896 – Plessy v Ferguson • Supreme Court declares “separate but equal” to be legal • “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it… The argument also assumes that social prejudice may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured except by an enforced commingling of the two races… If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.”
Plessy v. Ferguson • “The object of the Fourteenth Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either."
1905 – Niagara Movement • W.E.B. DuBois – advocated a much stronger stance than Booker T. Washington • “They do not expect that the free right to vote, to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated, will come in a moment; they do not expect to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely certain that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.” • “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.”
1909 – NAACP Formed • National Association for the Advancement of Colored People • The NAACP was formed partly in response to the continuing horrific practice of lynching and the 1908 race riot in Springfield, the capital of Illinois and resting place of President Abraham Lincoln. Appalled at the violence that was committed against blacks, a group of white liberals that included Mary White Ovington and Oswald Garrison Villard, both the descendants of abolitionists, William English Walling and Dr. Henry Moscowitz issued a call for a meeting to discuss racial justice. Some 60 people, seven of whom were African American (including W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell), signed the call, which was released on the centennial of Lincoln's birth. • Echoing the focus of Du Bois' Niagara Movement began in 1905, the NAACP's stated goal was to secure for all people the rights guaranteed in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, which promised an end to slavery, the equal protection of the law, and universal adult male suffrage, respectively.
Marcus Garvey / Back to Africa • 1914 – Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) • Urged African-Americans to be proud of their race, and return to Africa, their ancestral homeland • Founded a steamship company to transport blacks to Africa (Black Star Line) • Tried to persuade government of Liberia to grant settlers land (unsuccessfully)
Great Migration • Southern blacks moved north between 1910-1920 • Seeking economic opportunity (jobs) • Industry in the North, South still recovering from Civil War • Escaping Jim Crow South • Not an organized movement • “They left on their own accord for as many reasons as there are people who left. They made a choice that they were not going to live under the system into which they were born anymore and in some ways, it was the first step that the nation's servant class ever took without asking.“ -Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Great Migration • African-American populations in Northern cities expanded quickly • Whites resented jobs being taken by blacks • Considerable tension between whites and blacks • North had been against slavery, but not necessarily equality • Northern blacks worried that their previously calm lives would be upended • They were right to worry
1917 – East Saint Louis Riots • Widespread violence touched off by tension over blacks being employed in factories • Arson, beatings, lynchings, drive-by shootings • Hundreds of blacks killed, thousands fled city • “…you have black people being murdered in the most wanton and barbaric manner in East St. Louis; children being thrown back into flaming houses, people being boarded up in their houses before they're torched so that they couldn't escape. So even by American standards, East St. Louis was a horror.“ – Winston James
Streetcar being attacked during riot African-Americans being forced to leave town after the riots
